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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25404565">Kernel</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M'>Miss_M</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Blade Runner (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Character Study, Childbirth, Childhood, Creation, Gen, Masturbation, Memories, Pre-Canon, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:08:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,761</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25404565</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Ana used her own memories in her work, and one time she decided not to.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Juletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Kernel</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/gifts">primeideal</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I own nothing.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>2021: Dust</em>
</p><p>She is born, in blood and pain. Not <em>her</em> blood and pain, but she is nevertheless furious when she slips out, slippery eel, into the world, while a seasonal dust storm rages outside, grains seeping in around the window frames, under the door, into lungs and hair and under fingernails.</p><p>A face above her, one eye black, the other a black hole. A voice: “Oh. <em>Oh.</em>” Unaccustomed to wonder, only to blood and pain.</p><p>She opens her mouth to squall and chokes on the dust. A finger clears her mouth, her nose, a hand slaps her bare bottom to set her off. She roars. </p><p>The face with one eye passes her to another – hands as slippery with the same blood as she is all over. </p><p>“Look, Rachael, look.”</p><p>“It’s no use. She’s slipping.” But the one with bloody hands has the same voice: steeped with wonder, unable to process. </p><p>Ana doesn’t actually remember this. Of course she doesn’t, though she tries hard over the years to recreate it. The moment of one’s birth – all humans have it, hidden somewhere deep inside their cerebral cortex, and all replicants long for it. </p><p>She gives this conjured-up memory to several units, though she tries not to recycle – it’s sloppy, and sloppiness is how people get caught breaking the rules. They establish a pattern, get lazy, make themselves vulnerable. So she fudges enough details and gives vague sensations of being born to combat models, to make them just a little vulnerable to the harm they were designed to inflict. Just a little (more) human.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>2026: Fire</em>
</p><p>The trick with using real memories is not to overcommit or try to control every detail. Sketch it out, a few brushstrokes of soft color to offset the blank background, and then let the organic brain fill it in, flesh it out. Plant a kernel and leave it alone to grow. Make it real. More real than real. </p><p>She has always had the little horse with her birthdate carved into its hind legs, and she has always known to hide herself, pee when no one is watching, learn how to make a fist and where the soft bits that hurt are, and how to curl up when there are too many to punch back. </p><p>She carries the little horse everywhere with her, till that day in the furnace room. She gives the blade runner model a snippet of that day, the heat from the furnace on her face and hands, the smooth wood held securely between her fingers and her palm, the pain of being kicked again and again. The culmination of the drama, not the preamble – the days when she’d had to dodge the boys who were after her horse – nor the denouement. </p><p>The day after the day of the furnaces, Mr. Cotton calls her into his office. Waiting by his desk is a woman with an eyepatch. </p><p>“I will take you to your new parents,” she says. Her hand trembles when she touches Ana’s short hair. </p><p>“When?” Ana asks, sees Mr. Cotton squeeze his hand into a fist because she spoke without permission, but he no longer frightens her. </p><p>The woman smiles. “Now.”</p><p>Ana’s heart is beating so hard, she has to hold her breath to speak again: “I have to get something,” she says, thinking of the quickest way down to the furnaces, the pile of cold ash, then the longer way she’ll have to take to get back, unless she wants to run a gauntlet of children, all of them after her treasure. </p><p>The woman’s hand drops from her hair to her shoulder, firm and immobile. “No. Right now.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>2029: Snow</em>
</p><p>She is supposed to be asleep, but it’s snowing again, and she thinks that that must be alright: snow is clean and that’s why it’s white, even if this snow is more grey. Maybe snow is even sterile, so it’s safe for Ana. So she sits in the window seat and watches the heavy snowflakes against the streetlights, and listens to her parents talking behind their bedroom door. </p><p>“Do you think it was something at that orphanage which caused this?” Mother, hushed, terrified ever since Ana’s last trip to the doctor. “Or is it because of… of <em>what</em> she is?”</p><p><em>I’m not a</em> what, Ana thinks, suddenly mad, and in the bedroom, her father shushes her mother, and Ana is glad. How can she say such a thing, even if she is not Ana’s real-real mother! Even if they are leaving for off-world without her, and so Ana has already said that they don’t love her and made her mother cry.</p><p>It snowed also on Ana’s last birthday, when her father told her that, when his father was young, it never snowed in June, not in Los Angeles. </p><p>Ana sometimes uses memories of snow, crowds of people moving hurriedly through snowed-in streets, jostling with vendors of food or flesh, street cleaners and hawkers and police agents, barely undercover. She uses those memories for replicants slated for solitary outposts, monitoring comms relays in empty space and the like, never going planetside. It’s not just lack of humanity that destabilizes, it’s also lack of a palpable environment which changes with the hour and the season. Some of the first human colonization efforts failed because of it, humans gone mad inside sealed-off habitats orbiting distant stars.</p><p>But even though she loves snow, Ana prefers to give memories of birthday parties. So simple yet so <em>full</em>, and especially useful for the more expensive customizations, the ones that will be personal assistants, nannies, masseuses. The fullness of human contact, of being fêted and fussed over. The reminder that one was wanted and welcomed into other people’s lives. </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>2038: Water</em>
</p><p>Ana’s parents left plenty of funds to cover all of her needs. She is studying long-distance with the best tutors, the only dilemma in her intellectual future whether to work toward an advanced degree under a memory master located in Beijing or Cairo. Both are vying to train her. </p><p>No one else is vying for her, of course. It wouldn’t be safe, and she rather prefers it that way. But she does sometimes wish she could bring someone else into her isolation chamber, just once: a custom-designed replicant, built just for this occasion, brought to her in a vacuum-sealed container, deposited into her world through a cunningly hidden trapdoor only she knows about. A sterile body, single-use. </p><p>This would be prohibitively expensive, even for her, and so she lets her imagination run wild, equips this creation, this creature of her dreams with impossible specifications. An advanced pleasure model, able to intuit her every desire, even the ones she doesn’t yet know herself. Able to change appearance, morph body shape and appendages. Sweat, saliva, secretions all perfectly sterile but tasting and smelling like the real thing. The messy, the human thing. Why not? It’s good to dream a little.</p><p>Normally the imagined lovers that parade through Ana’s private moments are many and varied, but this time she focuses her mind away from imagined faces and body shapes, and on the sensations of her own body. The catch of her fingernail here, the deft pressure and glide of her finger pads, how the sweat starts to appear between her breasts and on her belly, how her breath starts to quicken, how her nipples peak. How she bites her lip and holds her breath when her climax builds, the moisture smoothing her way, how her body goes hard and shakes, her head rolls back, her throat makes silly noises, her fingers working, working, to prolong it. And then the slide back down, the heaviness of her body, the brief sated-ness, the drowsiness, even as she wishes her pleasure could linger longer. </p><p>She wants to build a memory of self-pleasure for the pleasure models destined for some of the roughest outposts: marine camps, mining colonies. The knowledge of one’s own body, the control of one’s own pleasure. She wants to get it just right. </p><p>She wipes the sweat off her upper lip with her non-dominant hand and lets herself doze off. She’ll have plenty to work with, plenty of kernels to choose from. </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>2044: Air</em>
</p><p>Niander Wallace is a slight man, but he fills the antechamber with his presence, a kind of halo of anti-light that radiates from him. Ana knows his face and his name even before he introduces himself. </p><p>“Dr. Stelline, I have heard <em>magnificent</em> things about your skills in designing memories,” he says in a voice that’s meant to be warm, flattery served at body-temperature, but something about his tone makes Ana grateful for the pane of bullet-proof glass between them.</p><p>She listens to him talk, negotiates gently, to assert herself a little rather than because she needs to: Wallace’s terms go much farther than mere generosity. And all the while she watches the way he stands still yet seems to expand, till he’s filled every cubic inch of space in the antechamber and is pressing against the glass. <em>Like a gas</em>, Ana thinks. Something whose presence is also an absence.</p><p>The memory of speaking to a man who radiated menace yet spoke softly, who seemed both immensely solid and yet barely there, proves quite useful for bodyguard models: it helps keep them alert if they can resist personalizing whomever it is they are supposed to protect. </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>2049</em>
</p><p>“Just a moment,” Ana says, crisp, white pixels swirling around her in a cone, a miniature snow storm at the center of her chamber, when the outside door opens. </p><p>“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she adds, <em>more snow than snow</em>, but there’s no answer. No one ever comes to her for small talk, it’s always something dead serious.</p><p>She turns off the hologram, pads up to the glass. The man standing outside is human, older, grimy, doesn’t look very official, yet not like a derelict that’s just wandered in, either. </p><p>He places his hand on the glass. It shakes in the moment before contact, like the one-eyed woman’s years before, on Ana’s last day at the orphanage. The man’s face is a cracked egg: trying to hold something big inside, yet everything starting to spill out, all at once. </p><p>In the moment before he speaks, Ana decides this is too important to recycle. Whatever it is, it’s something she’ll want to keep and not share with anyone. She can hear and see fine, but she leans closer to that hand – dirt and blood caked in the grooves on the palm – pressed up against the glass. Her whole body feels like a held breath.</p>
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